Amazon has opened its store in Australia. I wonder how long it will be before there will be casualties? In the USA, it did not take long. The very first one was one of the finest feminist bookshops in America, Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis. The proprietors of this store protested. They took amazon.com to court. They won a payout, but they still lost because they could no longer stay in business. When other feminist bookstore owners saw this outcome, many lost heart and gave up struggling to survive.

The demise of the Amazon Bookstore occurred in the midst of other changes in the book trade. The industry was being technologised. Amazon, Borders and other superstores had the financial resources to computerise all stock in their retail outlets. The lower turnover feminist and independent stores relied on knowledgeable staff who knew their stock and could take a customer to the correct shelf in the shop. Most of the independent booksellers had neither the knowledge base for technology nor the finances to move into this new way of operating. And even those who did rarely survived. By the end of the 1990s, few feminist bookstores remained.

Booksellers and publishers in other parts of the English-speaking world were also soon affected as globalisation spread and superstores were established in other territories.

Feminist publishers were the canary in the mine, because like the bookstores, they relied on a loyal audience. You would think that feminist publishers would do better with more players, but that was not so since the superstores are not interested in independent publishers who might publish for a select, niche audience. When independent bookstores folded, independent publishers also struggled and many went out of business.

These changes had a cascading effect on feminist publishers as well as on independents across the industry. As Mark Rubbo pointed out in his article on independent bookshops in the USA, independent bookshops have fallen from around 6,000 in the early 1990s to 2,321 in 2017. That is a loss of almost two thirds of the independents.

Like ecology, publishing is part of a complex system that responds to the changing forces in the world. Independent publishers often have a knack for anticipating cultural shifts. This is because they ride the fast-moving outer shoreline of the cultural river while the big publishers paddle in the shallow mainstream.

Publishing works in ways similar to farming and independent publishers are more like heirloom plants. Amazon promises a future of monocultures, the kind of monoculture that rides roughshod over bibliodiversity. It is also a process of recolonisation, and this is particularly evident in the digital space.

Self-publishing too has been appropriated, and much of it is now in the hands of Amazon. Traditional publishing involves a contract agreed upon by publisher and author, and although there have been many disgruntled authors who have signed up to contracts they later regretted, at least the publisher is obliged to obtain the consent of the author to change those conditions. Amazon, by contrast, reserves the right to change any part of its contract, for any reason, at any time with any author who has signed on. Writers need to inform themselves about the pitfalls of these new kinds of contracts. Against recolonisation we should bear in mind the words of Arundhati Roy in her 2003 book War Talk, that we should be prepared “to not only confront empire, but to lay siege to it.”

Small publishers have the advantage of flexibility and smaller lists to convert or create. Through our websites we can make literature available directly to our readers and we can engage with those readers. It is my hope that bibliodiversity will extend into this new digital space.

The contradictory positions of mega-publishers and independent publishers requires the latter to walk the tightrope between flexibility and early adoption of new technologies, and the “need” for wide distribution, which is almost totally in the hands of some of the most powerful and capitalised companies in the world.

In the world of contemporary globalised publishing we are facing the massive market power of one player: Amazon. Not only does Amazon have distorting power as a buyer – of books and eBooks from publishers (monopsony); but also as the most powerful seller – of books and other consumer goods to consumers (monopoly). It is the model favoured by imperialists of all kinds and a matter of recolonising our markets and our minds.

Independent presses represent our hope for the future. First the independent bookstores will feel the pinch; next it will be the independent publishers whose books are less likely to be stocked in the major bricks and mortar stores; writers will feel the crunch coming on their already low incomes; finally readers will miss out because the range of books available will be hugely diminished. Not only that, but marginal stories – and Australia is a marginal story in the global culture – will rarely be heard. If you are a reader, you might want to consider which books you buy and where. You might want to consider what will be left for your children to read. Will it be limited to mass-market American celebrity and violence stories? Or do you want something more?

• Susan Hawthorne is co-founder of Spinifex Press and author of Bibliodiversity: A Manifesto for Independent Publishing